TigerHawk

TigerHawk (ti*ger*hawk): n. 1. The title of this blog and the nom de plume of its founding blogger; 2. A deep bow to the Princeton Tigers and the Iowa Hawkeyes; 3. The nickname for Iowa's Hawkeye logo. Posts include thoughts of the day on international affairs, politics, things that strike us as hilarious and personal observations. The opinions we express are our own, and not those of each other, our employers, our relatives, our dead ancestors, or unrelated people of similar ethnicity.

Monday, October 10, 2011

Looterville

By TigerHawk at 10/10/2011 09:12:00 PM

According to at least one account, "Occupy Wall Street" has become something of a lesson in collectivism. Although not the sort intended by the protesters.

“They want to take showers, want to wash up and use the toilet paper to dry up. It becomes … you gotta have one person assigned just to clean the bathrooms,” said Steve Zamfotis, manager of “Charley’s” restaurant.

Zamfotis, who runs a pizza shop directly across the street from Zuccotti Park, said he has to stand guard at the door — just to keep protesters out.

There's a fair amount of precedent that, where it succeeds, it breaks left, then invites a backlash from the right that rules the day. See: French Revolution (where the Reign of Terror completely discredited the revolutionaries and laid the groundwork for a counter-revolution with the ultimate effect of re-establishing monarchism), Weimar Republic (rampant leftist street violence and terrorism set the stage for the Nazis, who promised order and to crush the communists), Chile (where Pinochet's military government was motivated to seize power after Allende's Marxist policies drove the economy into the ground), Mexican Revolution (Institutionalized Revolutionary Party... haha!), Iranian Revolution (sparked largely by intelligentsia and other assorted liberals, but seized by religious reactionaries who didn't balk at using violence), et cetera.

However, this absurd and childish rabble we have in the streets now is too unorganized, ineffectual, and weak to bring about any of the kinds of change they seem to think they're working toward. I think these 'protests' are basically a "Who's Who in Vagrancy of 2020."